2.1.2-Doeskin-pantaloons
Brick!Club 2.1.2: Hougomont Is it weird that I get more Waterloo feels than I did Fantine and Valjean feels? I don’t think this is normal. Like, Fantine and Valjean I was feeling frustrated at society, but Waterloo is just outright tragedy. (See yesterday’s rant. I will try not to repeat it.) I’ve been reading up on Waterloo so I can understand what’s going on, and the only thing I ever find myself thinking is why? There’s this farmhouse, in this field, in rural Belgium, and thousands of people have died for it. I struggle to get my head around this. As Hugo said: all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo! Firstly: no, Hugo. That is not why anyone fought this war. But I see what he means. All this, and all that it has achieved today is that some peasant can make three Francs off showing you a few cannon-ball holes. Hugo is about as subtle with his anti-war message as a tonne of bricks, and but yet he still makes it sound incredibly - glorious? heroic? six against two hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a quarter of an hour to die. I mean, on the one hand, you have the ‘Oh God, for a quarter of an hour they were dying tragically this is horrible’ reaction, but all the way from the Battle of Thermopylae to the Charge of the Light Brigade, we’re culturally conditioned to cheer for the futile fight of few against many, and regardless of the fact that everybody dies, to see it as some sort of a good thing. (Honestly, if this weren’t the case, would any of us be reading this book?) And Hugo, in spite of all his war-is-futile sentiments, is really playing on that. As Fizzy said: his description of the war isn’t about armies; it’s about soldiers. He tells the story with so much visceral detail that it’s impossible to separate history from the people who created it. He shows us the tragedy and the horror, but at the same time he humanises it, so that yes, war is bad, but the people who fight in war are trying really, really hard and it’s tragic and horrible because in the end they all die. But they are people, and what they did, at the time and in the context they did it, was the bravest and most noble thing to do. To continue my theme of reactions to war (because all the symbolism in this chapter has probably been done, since I’m a bit late to the party), the peasant woman tells us: "We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated the cannon, and went boum! boum!" And earlier Hugo says: these poor bivouacs trembling in the depths of the thickets. As it turns out, according the Wiktionary, a bivouac is a camp for the night, but also: The watch of a whole army by night, when in danger of surprise or attack. Both definitions kind of work here, and I like that it’s ambiguous. These people crouching in the woods somewhere, hiding out in terror, but at the same time they’ve got an ear to the ground and they’re listening to the battle. Now, I can’t imagine that by listening to the cannon, you could tell who was winning and who was losing, or how the tide of the battle was turning. All you would know is whether the fighting was intense or not. It seems to me that the issue for the peasants is not who wins or loses, but much more, “Somebody just took over my house to stage a war. Will everything be okay?” No, peasants. Nothing in this book is ever okay. Because look at the house now: The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds; the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee. More practically that trees quivering in flight, there are staircases floating in the air, and the well is full of skeletons. I’m assuming that these people simply don’t have the resources to fix up their house, but I really feel like Napoleon and Wellington just fucked it over and moved on. Can you imagine coming home after that? To three hundred dead bodies in your well? (Don’t imagine this, guys. Don’t do it.) Today’s moral: War is hell, and life sucks if you’re a peasant.